There could scarcely be a more quietly simple or eloquently evocative description of that forbidding deathbed moment when, after a lengthy vigil, one watches a loved one slip from fitful life to silent death. ''Sparse breath, then none. And it was done.’’ Neither can there be a more apt portrayal of ''those last few days of drug-drowse, coma-comfort’’ than poet Christopher Reid’s description, in The Unfinished, of how, as his wife of almost 30 years lay dying, he ''cultivated my clumsy, husbandly bedside manner, as she lay as her nurses arranged her; reposeful beloved, stark stranger – or something in between.’

''You express yourself in the language with which you are comfortable’’ Reid says. ''And for me that language is poetry. I wouldn’t have known how to do it in prose.’’

It is a language at which, quite clearly, he excels. Last week Reid, 60, was awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in poetry, the £5,000 Costa Book Award, with an anthology written in tribute to his late wife, the actress Lucinda Gane. Later this month his volume, A Scattering, will compete against those of the winners of the four other catagories for the overall Costa Book of the Year award, which is worth £30,000.

The moment he was told he had won the poetry section was, he concedes, “bitter sweet. One is competitive, of course you are,” he says. “But there is an element of almost guilt. Of ruefulness that winning was borne of what was the worst tragedy in my life. After Lucinda’s death [from brain cancer] in October 2005 I was utterly numb. Completely wrecked. Absolutely despondent.’’ It was only then that the full force of the finality of bereavement walloped him in the face. ''If she had been under medical sedation then I was under emotional sedation,’’ he admits. ''But then that is the surprise that nature has in store for us. I did nothing for three months. Had it not been for the fact that I was working on the Letters of Ted Hughes [published two years ago] when Lucinda became very ill, and had that to go back to, I could not have done it. I thank fortune that I could pick up Ted from where I had dropped him.”

Now, another might have thanked God. But not Reid. As an atheist neither faith nor sacred belief played a supporting role during the weeks and months he nursed his wife as she was slowly robbed of life. And yet A Scattering, which consists of four poetic sequences charting her final illness and his life beyond, is as awash with all the humility for and sanctity of life and death, that its secular thread distracts not at all from its lack of religious context.

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But one can’t help wondering how the late Lucinda would feel about her husband laying bare so publicly the couple’s emotional intimacy? Reid does not hesitate. ''I am 100 per cent convinced she would approve,’’ he says. ''She was a very demanding reader. The first to complain if she thought an author wasn’t telling the full story.’’

And Reid certainly tells the story of his wife’s painfully deteriorating illness as it was. Yet nowhere does he rail against the unfairness and unpredictability of death. Instead his poems are a lucid, cogent panorama of grief and loss: from the first diagnosis of illness to Reid’s ultimate acceptance of his unwilling membership of “the club of the left-over living.”

“It’s true, I wasn’t angry at Lucinda’s cancer,” he says. “She was very factual and practical about it. She accepted it and I think, perhaps, I borrowed some of that acceptance from her.’’ Reid stares down for a moment, slowly stirring the coffee he has made. It is silent in his tiny garret kitchen, perched at the top of his three-storey home in Camden. It is the archetypal backdrop for the bohemian, soulful poet in him. It is cosy and calm. The detritus of domesticity, kettles and cups, sit by the sink. Along one shelf, hanging from hooks, are an array of hand-made, mismatched pottery cups. Above sits a framed photograph of Reid and his wife, taken on their wedding day in 1976: she glowing, he with an air of the cat that got the very best of the cream. On the fridge magnetic letters of the alphabet spell out the stanzas of a poem from his most recent collection: aptly named Magnetic.

“Hmm,” he says thoughtfully. “Very soon after Lucinda’s death someone asked me if I was angry. No, I said. There is no-one to be angry with. No-one to blame. I don’t even have a God to blame. But it has left me wondering if it would have been useful to be angry. But Lucinda was so practical, so unafraid of what she was facing that I took my example from her.”

Some years before, he explains, a close friend – known for his angry manner – became very philosophical about his own impending death. “Lucinda was very impressed by that,” he says. “It was how she wanted to face her own. As an actress, was she playing a role in death? Good question. I don’t think so. But then I was part of the play too.”

It isn’t easy, one suspects, for Reid to talk in detail of Lucinda’s death. His manner is self-contained. But it is in his poems that his vocabulary speaks loudest. In one he talks of her cancer thus: “No imp or devil but a mere tumour squatted on her brain. Without personality or ill humour, malignant but not malign, it set about doing not evil, simply the job tumours have always done: establishing faulty connections, skewing perceptions, closing down faculties and functions one by one. Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend; not even the jobsworth slob with a slow, sly scheme to rob my darling of her mind that I imagined; just a tumour.” Written in the language of a poet it is an altogether more moving way of expressing his lack of anger.

Born in Hong Kong – his father, a Scot, worked for Shell – Reid was educated at British boarding schools. And creative writing was always his passion. He published his first poem – a humorous, limerick-like six liner entitled Nebuchadnezzar – in his local parish magazine when he was eight. He read English at Oxford though confesses he wasn’t a good student. “I was immature, out of my depth, he shrugs. ''Full of self pity, I kept thinking: 'I’m at Oxford, why am I not enjoying myself. You know the sort of thing,’’ he says, raising his eyebrows. It was at university that he struck up a friendship with the poet and critic Craig Raine who became a mentor. After Oxford he began writing, financed by a £350 legacy from a Godfather. ''Went a long way in those days,’’ he says wryly. When it ran out he took a succession of odd jobs until The Listener began publishing his poems. Reid moved to London where he edited with the Craft Council. But he was never cut out to be office bound. “After two years I’d had enough,” he says matter-of-factly. “I was going stir crazy.”

He met Lucinda Gane, then fresh from drama school, in 1976 when both were 27. “It all started with a friend’s match-making which went awry, thank goodness,” he explains. “She invited both of us to a dinner party – but not as intended partners for each other. My first memory of Lucinda was thinking what a terrible green dress she was wearing. It didn’t suit her at all. She didn’t think so either.” It was a good beginning though. They began dating and married.

Their childlessness was not by choice. “I was ok with it,” Reid says, “but it was a constant regret for Lucinda.” If Reid has written a poem about her childlessness, doubtless it would instantly evoke the longing known only to a woman who yearns for motherhood.

Reid’s career took off. He was poetry editor at Faber and Faber from 1991 to 1999 and, latterly, Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hull. He opened his own independent publishing house, Ondt and Gracehoper, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden prise and the Signal Poetry Award. As well as being winning the Costa poetry section A Scattering has been nominated for two other awards – The Forward Poetry Prixe and The T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. He was twice nominated for the Whitbread Poetry Award and his edition of Letters of Ted Hughes, published two years ago, was recently released in paperback. Lucinda appeared in many television and stage productions, the best known probably as science teacher Miss Mooney in the children’s television programme, Grange Hill.

Her first brush with cancer came when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 38. “She reacted very differently the first time round,” Reid recalls. “She was angry. Very determined to battle it. And she did. She had all the treatment and we believed it was gone for good. Then, several years ago, she began to have pains in her shoulder and tiredness. She put it down to decorating but when it continued she went to the doctor.”

The diagnosis, that she had little more than a year to live was, of course, devastating. For Reid. “Lucinda wasn’t angry this time. She was accepting, very calm. She focused on how she could use her time left productively. She set up a theatre company that put on two productions.”

Reid, by contrast, struggled to accept her illness. “But my role was to give her encouragement. To lend emotional support. So that’s what I set about doing.”

Understandably, it took a long time to complete A Scattering. “Once time had passed it all became so clear,’’ he says. ''Writing The Unfinished was almost like taking dictation. The third section of the book is about my grieving and, obviously I had to do that before I could shape it in poetry.” In one poem, entitled Afterlife, he walks past the hospital to which his life left her body for research, and thinks: “That’s where my dead wife lives. I hope they’re treating her kindly.” It was, he admits, a sobering moment. ''I don’t talk to her as much as I did at first. To my shame,’’ he admits. ''But there isn’t a day when I don’t think of her in some way or other.

His wife, he says, was always very proud of his literary work. Would it please her that she has been immortalised in verse? “Oh yes,” Reid smiles. “She would have been so very pleased that she was the catalyst for my very best work.”